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Direc video acceleration (open, unencumbered video codec)

11-29-2008, 12:06 AM

I wasn't sure where to put this since it relates to drivers from every hardware vendor, but since Dirac is completely open and royalty-free and all that, and especially because I guess it's better than Theora video, it's now totally free to implement acceleration for it in the open source video drivers that are out there, as well of course as the close source ones.

I was wondering what Intel, AMD, and Nvidia would have to say about Dirac and Theora support. Supposedly Dirac is even more "powerful" than H264, WMV, etc, or has the potential to be at least. I've been experimenting with Dirac encoding and so far it seems quite impressive.

Decoding has finally been implemented in VLC, MPlayer, and the GStreamer framework (Totem, etc), and so far I assume MPlayer has the encoder implemented but I know that OggConvert does (many or all of these programs are using the Schroedinger library implementation), which is a great and very easy to use Gnome program. Currently there is a bug that makes it hang though when trying to convert anything to Dirac that has audio in it, but that bug and some others should be gone in the next version.

Any way, I just thought it was exciting and I think Dirac should take off since it's an entirely open codec in comparison to the legally encumbered alternatives for "high definition" movies. I prefer sticking to the open codecs so that, for starters, stupid lawyer companies like the one that "owns" the copyright on MP3 won't come after developers. Give developers a break, use safe codecs to encode/decode!

I was wondering what Intel, AMD, and Nvidia would have to say about Dirac and Theora support. Supposedly Dirac is even more "powerful" than H264, WMV, etc, or has the potential to be at least. I've been experimenting with Dirac encoding and so far it seems quite impressive.

Comment

Is there a good comparison with current codecs somewhere, similar to doom9's shootouts? I'd love to know how good all these new codecs are

Yeah I was hoping for that too, but the only review Doom9 has done is really old and Dirac basically had to sit it out because it wasn't even fully implemented yet. Now that it is and is a stable version 1.0, they need to do a bunch of comparisons.

So, what I need to do is either rip myself or get a raw video without sound and use OggConvert and other programs to test it better, take some stills for a close visual comparison.

Comment

Ermmmm do you know what video output driver supports this, is it the new VDPAU the same that they are using for H264 now and such? Or can XVMC or XV or whatnot use this acceleration?

No this has been around for a long time already. It needs Cuda to run (thus a nvidia card that supports Cuda and the blobs). It's a different way of doing acceleration of playback, however it demonstrates that probably the most fexible way of doing playback acceleration in linux will use GPGPU libraries via openCL in the near future. XV and XvMC support is not needed as the GPU does all of the functions of these already via nvidia's Cuda . It's a good proof-of-concept without having to rely on vender specific engines instead provide acceleration via GPGPU via openCL. The other advantage to this route is that it could also be used for preprocessing for encoding (scaling, deinterlacing etc etc). If the processing of filters is done by a GPGPU method ala openCLin ffmpeg for example then there is alot more flexiblity in it's applications as the benifits would not be limited to playback.